The ‘desire for money:’ Aristotelian blind spot in the field of economics? A French heterodox point of view

Abstract

If the field of economics has today become the archetype for determinism in the social sciences, it comes at the price of a form of objectivity founded on the complex process of the reduction and naturalization of a certain type of social relation, a process best described via the real approach or the ‘approach by value.’ A radical critique of this process requires the deconstruction of this dominant approach, characterized by the articulation of neoclassical theory and economic liberalism. It is only once the repression of the desire for money, a repression constitutive of false economic objectivity, has been denounced that the standard model can then be subject to such a critique. This will in turn open the possibility of an economic theory which is radically anti-naturalist.

Keywords

• Naturalism
• Real approach
• Monetary approach
• Desire for money